


Not Forgotten

by Fuoco



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, Gen, Near Future, Reincarnation, Tartarus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 11:58:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3208352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fuoco/pseuds/Fuoco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The name Nico Di Angelo is not quickly forgotten. When Bianca is young and life is simple, Nico is a troublesome imaginary friend. He is the face of a faceless but familiar character in children’s books. He is a fiery nightmare that wakes her up screaming.<br/>He is in trouble.<br/>In her head and in her dreams, Bianca fails to save him a thousand times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Forgotten

Her father wipes one tear from many off her face and, in the same stroke, her existence as Bianca Di Angelo.

One straw stands out in contrast against the rest of her evaporating consciousness - In a sea of lightness and acceptance, it shone as her single regret. Where every other memory would slip through her fingers, the regret sat belongingly in her palm.

A name that is not her own tumbles with her into the next life. She is born crying.

…

The name _Nico Di Angelo_ is not quickly forgotten. When Bianca is young and life is simple, Nico is a troublesome imaginary friend. He is the face of a faceless but familiar character in children’s books. He is a fiery nightmare that wakes her up screaming.

_He is in trouble_.

In her head and in her dreams, Bianca fails to save him a thousand times.

…

When she finally comes across myths and monsters and tragic Greek heroes, she tells her mother with youthful certainty _‘This is who he is’_.

When she reads about a godly hell she says, with what she fears is accuracy, ‘ _This is where he is.’_

…

In the aftermath of monsters – in losing her home, her eye, _her mother_ – the name finally fades. She loses herself in a whirlwind that is equal parts understanding and misery. Bianca is told who she is and why she is and that there are many people like her. On the surface she accepts it, but some place in the back of her soul knows they aren’t going deep enough.

It is because of Percy Jackson that she almost changes for good.  He is her Savior, Mentor, and above all – her _brother_.  Her godly brother who teaches her to fight and shoot and bend the tides –he teaches her to be powerful _and_ human.

It is when he teaches her that dreams have meaning that Bianca learned it was Percy, not the imaginary Nico, she had always dreamt of.

There couldn’t possibly be two people on earth so powerful, broken, and lonely.

…

On nights at the beach, when the stars align just right, Percy would talk about heroes. He would talk about the dead sons and daughters of gods and their too-young also-dead sons and daughters and the three wars he managed to live through even though his hair wasn’t yet gray. To each hero, he dedicates a books-worth of stories all told in reverse: from their last quest to the moment he met them.

Because of this, Bianca couldn’t blame him for taking so long to get to Nico. His is a long story that takes the whole night, and Bianca is half asleep by the time the hero who was lost to Tartarus becomes a boy with a card came and a dead sister. At this, Bianca wakes up.

And then _Bianca wakes up._

_…_

She is too young to go on her own, she didn’t need to be told. Bianca knows entire stories about demigods who had died going on her own. However, Bianca was just old enough to not care about permission.  

The night before she leaves, she dreams of the story Percy would tell much later – somehow making the foolish girl who left for Tartarus sound heroic down to the moment he pulled her from the rubble of her home. She dreamt of oblivion and straws, and of becoming a regret among thousands of regrets that Percy would reach for on his way to the next life.

But that regret would have a name and a soul that weren’t hers. Percy had never known her as Bianca, but as a daughter of Posiedon by a different name and mother.  As she walked through the early morning shadows she felt the _Bianca_ history had known –

and that Nico now depended on.

…

Bianca knew both biblical and mythical descriptions of hell, but the only thing that had ever come close to correct was the Tartarus she had seen through her dreams, Percy’s stories and Nico’s eyes. The worst nightmares she had ever had were memories for Nico, she realized. Even then, what she felt secondhand was only a fraction of Tartarus’ horror.

With every movement, a new blister would form and burst on her skin. She would drink fire to heal, and in mere minutes she would be bleeding again. Blessedly, she only saw the earthy façade of Tartarus – not the veins and breath she had dreamed through Nico.

Bianca’s eye, which had spent years sightless, reactivated as she moved deeper. Whilst in her left eye she saw broken glass, fire, and her own blood, her right eye was focused on a lush green pomegranate tree.  She would have excused it as a pleasant hallucination if she hadn’t hated the fruit so much – and if the skyline in the distance of the vision wasn’t so bloody and familiar.

A god, or possibly Nico himself, had offered her a goal. With the tree in mind, the fire in her throat seemed to blister a little less.

…

She finds the tree at the apex of a cold, dark oasis near the heart of Tartarus itself. The vision in her broken eye shifts to match the other. Both visions show Bianca that neither the tree nor the figure underneath it had the warmth of something alive.

Bianca was frozen at a distance not only by the freezing cold, but by fear. Nico, who had aged years before she had ever been born again, whom she had left alone long before death took her away, Nico who was once her brother, lay as real as she had dreamed at the foot of the gnarly tree. He was no longer a dream, or a story hero, or an imaginary friend. He was her little brother and responsibility.

Bianca was an older sister again.

Every step she took was driven by a different memory: various birthdays where he’d either destroy the cake or eat it by himself, the time he cried for their dying pet before it was ever sick, the time – approximately several real months into their internment at the Lotus – where he asked her if it was okay to be there so long and he _trusted_ her when she said yes.

The shining contrast of regret against lightness began to blur until all that remained was a vision of Nico as he was – Pale and sickly. He had grown since she’d known him, but not as much as he should have. Eight or Nine empty pomegranates sat unrotting around him, with half of another sitting in his deeply fruit-dyed hands. Whatever effect they had on him had kept him from aging more than a couple years in the two decades since her own death.

Bianca sat across from her brother and waited for him to breathe again.

…

“Up there, my name is Maria.” Bianca pointed at the sliver of light above them with one hand. In her other hand she held Nico’s – it had been months and his fingers were still red.

“Maria?” He laughed. They’d agreed some time ago that she looked more like their mother in this life than the first Bianca Di Angelo did.

“Yes. And Nico Di Angelo is a dream.” She never imagined, in the struggle that had been a year spent escaping Tartarus, that she’d be hesitant to leave at the door. Her eye was visionless again, with just the ghost of Nico’s face apparent against the blackness. “This will all probably be a dream, too. But I’m still Bianca, you know.”

“I know,” he kissed her blistered forehead in a way their mother had always done, but Bianca never did.

There were many things Bianca never did.

“This time,” she choked on the question she’d been afraid to ask. “It’s just, this time you get to decide whether you want me as your sister.” She couldn’t stop her eyes from watering up as Nico’s face in her visionless eye disappeared again. “…I would really, really like to be your sister.”

It takes a second for Nico to respond. Bianca has to look up to see his face – as tearful as her own, but smiling a slightest bit.

He ruffles her hair – as Bianca had always done –

\- and they walk out into the light.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I had the terrible idea of Nico never getting captured by Gaeas guys and just getting stuck there. So I decided to get around to the Reincarnated Bianca thing to make everything better.


End file.
